When I'm Gone
by Tolakasa
Summary: Preseries. Alicia asked Dean to help her die, and he did, but neither of them knew exactly why she had to ask in the first place. References events mentioned in Rebound. OC POV.


**When I'm Gone**

Three of them watch the flames consume her body.

On one side is the young man who killed her, in the ragged jeans and leather jacket she had so quickly learned to love—_so very quickly_—with the amulet she had given him around his neck. He is still unused to its weight, to the chafing of the cord against his neck, of half-seeing the glints of gold with every movement, and she has lost count of the times he has started to reach for it and then forced himself to stop.

Alicia stands opposite him, watching him struggle not to weep. He is not given to tears, this scarred young man, and today he has wept more than he has since he was a child. She knows he is embarrassed by the weakness, all these tears for a girl who was practically a _stranger_, a lover but hardly loved.

At the head of the pyre stands the one who orchestrated this, an apparition garbed in light and flame. Alicia has never known its reasons; known only that the Other was long dead, and that it looks like the pictures of angels that her mother used to show her—an angel without wings, but the rest very much in line with those glorious drawings: all brilliant white, with hair the color of gold and flame, wreathed in a cloak of golden flame that obscures its human features, leaving it only a dazzling shadow.

Evil should not look so holy. She knows it is evil because nothing good would demand this of her, demand that they trail Dean through a hundred towns waiting for him to be alone and vulnerable, demand that _Alicia_ betray him with a kiss and a request.

He cannot see them, and it is not because of the tears still welling in his eyes and the smoke rising from the pyre.

"Why did you make me do this?" she whispers. Dean would never hear a whisper over the crackling fire, even had she been corporeal, but the Other—the Other reads her thoughts, it seems, has always seemed, since the beginning.

She could have loved him. Maybe, in enough time, with enough healing—it doesn't take a ghost to learn, and learn quickly, that Dean Winchester is scarred; he betrays it by every attempt he makes to hide it—he could have loved her. That capacity has not yet been beaten out of him.

Not yet.

Not while he can still weep.

He wept over her—not for her, she knew, so much as for the things he told her and the things she knew before they met: tears never shed for his mother, for missing his brother, for the heartbreak of a relationship so recently ended. Alicia remembers that, remembers the way he held on to her as she bled all over him, remembers the world going gray and fuzzy in an embrace so tight that it would have left bruises if she'd survived it. No matter what happens when the body is ash and the Other finally releases her, she will remember that desperate embrace.

The Other does not answer. It seldom does. It has a purpose here, and its purpose does not include revealing its motives to Alicia. Never. Not since the night the fire consumed Alicia's family, and the Other snatched her before she shared their fate.

Some nights in this long second life, when the Other has disappeared on its own business, leaving Alicia sitting on the empty beach, wriggling her toes in the sand, watching the stars dance and the waves crash, she thinks that she died that night too, that the Other tore her out of her body before she could properly die, saving her, giving her new flesh and form and training her for this very purpose, for _Dean_. Why else this bizarre half-existence, its insistence that she learn about the world without ever _touching_ it, a world that spun wildly by and reinvented itself while Alicia watched, that she maintain a facade of innocence while making sure it was no more than a facade? Why else the continuous and continuously altered lessons in how to dress, how to act, what to say, what to do? Why is this thing in the guise of an angel encouraging her to _seduce_ a man in his own car, and all the while act _innocent?_

What does it want with this poor man? What tortured future is it putting into place? Has he not suffered enough?

"More will come," the Other says, and Alicia realizes that it is answering the unspoken thought. "It is this pain now, or a greater pain later." Wind makes the flames of the pyre dance, and for a moment the Other becomes more human, almost feminine. Alicia could swear her eyes are blue, her expression as she watches Dean maternally sad—and then the moment is gone and it is all light and flame again. "He must learn to kill."

"He already knows how to kill!" Alicia shouts, and Dean jerks around, startled, as if he hears her. Perhaps he does. A lifetime of training has made him sensitive to the things which others deny, like ghosts and demons and poltergeists. But had the Other not seen the weapons in the trunk, the guns and knives, holy water and salt, rosaries and antique books in three languages? Had it not seen the easy assurance with which Dean offered to show her how to use any one of them on herself, if dying was really what she wanted? Didn't it see that he had a gun in that jacket right _now_, when he was burning a corpse in the middle of nowhere Texas, where half the neighbors didn't care _what_ you did at night as long as you didn't wake them up and nobody who wasn't married wound up pregnant?

"He knows how to kill," the Other agrees, its voice almost sad, "but not how to sacrifice. Not how to sacrifice _others_, only himself. J— His father taught him that. Unintentionally, but those were the lessons."

It all snaps into place, then, in a flash of insight that perhaps only the dead—only the _twice_-dead—can claim. "His brother," Alicia whispers. "You want him to kill _his brother_." She has known Dean all of three days, and knows that such an act would destroy him, would be the single wound from which he could _never_ recover. He would kill his father before he killed his brother. He would kill his father _for_ his brother.

"He must be prepared." The Other's answer is flat, distant, as it watches Dean turn his attention back to the fire, watches him toss a few more handfuls of salt onto the pyre and poke the dying flames with a stick, making sure the bones char and crumble.

Alicia watches him, sees that horrible future stretching out before him, before this young man who killed her just because she asked, who held her and kissed her and tried to talk her out of it and finally wept for her even as he shoved the knife into her— "I won't let you do that to him."

The glare is answer enough. The fires die down for an eternity of heartbeats, both its and the pyre's, and the summer air is suddenly cold. "I release you, Alicia," it says. "Your time here is over. Your body has been destroyed. There is nothing to hold you here. If you try—"

If Dean sees her, he will know immediately what she is. Because of the wording of his promise, the promise she tricked from him while they lay twined under a stained and threadbare blanket that was likely older than either of them, he will immediately attempt to destroy her. And he will succeed. Loyalty, determination, stubbornness—these, not common sense, are Dean's virtues.

Ever since the Other tore her out of the fire and away from the fate of her family, Alicia has craved nothing more than the release that was promised to her, that someday she would be allowed to rejoin her family. And now...

"No," she replies. Release means that the Other can do nothing to her. She now controls her own spirit, as any ghost should, and the body that Dean is so conscientiously burning was never really hers to begin with. Ghosts who survive the destruction of their mortal coils are free to wreak whatever havoc they wish, once they realize their freedom. It is a loophole that few hunters survive.

She reaches through the flames of her pyre to Dean, to the amulet nestled awkwardly against his chest, and touches it, intentionally binds herself to it and Dean's fate; she knows he has already promised himself to never remove it, a constant reminder of what he is capable of, of a woman he once knew in Galveston, who requested the impossible and received it at his hands. Let that guilty gift be her new body, the thing that keeps her here, at least until it is destroyed and she has to rely on something less solid. "If I do nothing else, I'll protect him from _you_," she snarls, fierce for the first time in any of her lives.

"Little girl," it says, and it is _her_ again, maternal and threatening and eyes blazing blue; a woman's spirit, this, not some androgynous demon pretending to be an angel, "there's nothing out there that _you_ can protect _my son_ from."

And then she smiles, this woman—oh, definitely a woman, definitely a mother, _Dean's_ mother, how could she have not seen this before, when the Other told her about the fire that stole Dean's childhood? "But I love that you want to try," Mary says, and the cheap metal glows with power and Alicia feels herself become part of it, in a way that no simple ghost could ever manage.

She has taught him to kill, this night, but she will do her best to make sure he never has to.

**_the end_**


End file.
